On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 05:47, Andrea Righi wrote: > On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 05:10:41AM -0400, Mike Frysinger wrote: >> On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 05:01, Andrea Righi wrote: >> > On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 10:14:53AM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote: >> >> On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 11:35:27PM +0200, Andrea Righi wrote: >> >> > This functionality can be used by all the applications that want to >> >> > have a >> >> > better control over the page cache management (for example to >> >> > immediately drop >> >> > pages that for sure will not be reused in the near future, without >> >> > calling >> >> > posix_fadvise() for all the files they've touched), or to provide a >> >> > more fine >> >> > grained debugging feature usable by the filesystem benchmarks. >> >> > >> >> > The system call does not require root privileges and it can be called >> >> > by any >> >> > unprivileged application. For example, we can write a userspace tool to >> >> > run >> >> > something like this: >> >> > >> >> > $ drop-pagecache /path/file_or_dir >> >> >> >> That's a potential DOS vector, I think. Drop the pagecache in a hard >> >> loop on the root fs of a busy server and watch it crawl... >> > >> > Yes, probably we could allow only the CAP_SYS_ADMIN tasks to execute >> > this syscall. >> >> if /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches has any checks other than file permission >> checks (i.e. UID==0), it'd probably be better to copy those rather >> than picking something different. > > ok, what about checking current_euid() == 0?
that's not what i meant. if the drop_caches file already has certain cap checks/whatever in place, let's use those. if it doesnt, then picking a cap level as you proposed makes sense. -mike -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-api" in the body of a message to [email protected] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
